Ola Electric gets $250 million push from SoftBank

“Celebrating five years of strong partnership, looking forward to the years ahead. Very excited about our partnership to build mobility and electric mobility for India and the world,” Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO at Ola, tweeted.

Ola Electric is currently running several pilots involving charging solutions, battery swapping stations, and deploying vehicles across two, three and four-wheeler segments. (Reuters)

With this latest round of funding, the company joins the unicorn list — the likes of Flipkart, Zomato, Paytm as well as its parent, Ola — as it is valued at an estimated $950 million to $1 billion, according to Vivek Durai, co-founder at Paper.vc. So far, the firm has raised about $310 million, according to data from Crunchbase.

“Celebrating five years of strong partnership, looking forward to the years ahead. Very excited about our partnership to build mobility and electric mobility for India and the world,” Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO at Ola, tweeted regarding Ola’s partnership with SoftBank.

As per the filings, OEM issued “4,326 fully and compulsorily convertible series B preference shares of face value of Rs 10 each having the rights, privileges and preferences…” to SB Topaz (Cayman) Ltd. The total amount paid was about Rs 1,725.04 crore, it added.

The allotment was made on Tuesday following a special resolution passed by the board members on June 25, the filing showed. SoftBank is also the single largest investor in Ola. In May, Tata Sons chairman emeritus Ratan Tata — who is also an investor in Ola — and Gaurav Deepak reportedly jointly invested Rs 14.9 crore in OEM as part of Series A funding round. Also as part of the Series A, OEM had announced raising Rs 400 crore led by Tiger Global and Matrix India in March this year.

Ola Electric is currently running several pilots involving charging solutions, battery swapping stations, and deploying vehicles across two, three and four-wheeler segments. In 2018, Ola announced ‘Mission: Electric’ to bring 1 million electric vehicles on Indian roads by 2021.